There was an awkward silence. Her eyes were red. She needed the book more than she needed my food.
‘There are many varieties of Muslims?’ I asked. ‘I have heard about the Shia, the Sunni and the Sufi. What kind of a Muslim are you?’
‘Homeless,’ she said.
Her response eased some of the tension between us.
‘You see that mountain up there, where the bright lights are?’ I pointed through the window. ‘That is where my room is.’
She nodded.
‘I have lived there, in the barracks, for a while now. Sometimes when I am down in the valley, or here in the hospital at night, the mountain up there looks like a huge aircraft. When the lights are turned on in the evening it appears as if the aircraft is ready to depart.’
She remained silent. I kept talking. Now that I think about it what a fool I made of myself. To this day I have not figured out how to stop talking when in the presence of a beautiful woman.
‘On certain nights,’ I said, ‘I hear the sound of sirens, ambulances rushing towards this hospital, and I feel as if the aircraft is about to explode.’
She moved closer to the window, carrying her plate of Rogan Josh. There was a slight limp in her walk.
‘You talk like men in Bombay films.’
The way she said this so fearlessly, so unexpectedly, impressed me a lot.
‘The mountain is visible from our side also,’ she continues. ‘From the other side of the river, we too get to see it. The children in our village point at the memorial at the very top of the mountain. Have you been there?’
‘No,’ I say.
She turns. She is so beautiful. I can’t point at a concrete detail of her face and say that is why she is beautiful. I just turn away my eyes.
‘Mihirukula’s memorial,’ she says.
I force my gaze and desperately try to find a flaw in that beauty. I fail. Then, I succeed. There are big gaps between her teeth. Her teeth are not beautiful.
‘Mihirukula?’
‘The White Hun’s memorial,’ she says.
‘The Hun?’
She speaks very slowly, revealing her teeth. She tells me something women don’t usually tell men they have just met. There was a garden in our village. Now it is a ruin. The White Hun came with a huge army of elephants. Elephants? I clarify. Yes, she says. Elephants. One of them fell from the cliff, 10,000 feet below. The Hun loved it. He was amused by the shriek of the falling animal. With one little finger he commanded his men to kick off four hundred elephants purely for his amusement. Trumpet-like sounds. For days afterwards my ancestors heard the echoes of dying creatures.
Then all was silence.
In my village the ambulance sirens remind us of elephants, she says.
Why did you tell me this?
She tries to sit down. The plate falls from her trembling hand, staining her iridescent pheran. Then the spoon lands in slow motion on the carpet. Why did you tell me? You Kashmiris from top-man to bottom-man are all anti-India. Her eyes turn red like a brick. Saheb, I am not like that, she stammers. Some militants in our village are planning to kill. But I don’t want Kashmir back if most of us end up dead.
‘Who are the men going to kill?’
‘The biggest officer of your military.’
‘The General?’
‘I think so.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I heard it in the village. Please save him. His car must never pass the Zero Bridge.’
‘Not a word more.’
The nurse was angry with Irem when she returned. There was Rogan Josh on the carpet, and its long trail was visible on Irem’s pheran. She asked me to step out for a minute, and when I re-entered the room Irem had changed into a striped kurta-pyjama. She looked uncomfortable in the oversize pyjama-kurta. The drawstring dangled. I turned my gaze downwards and focused only on the carpet, her feet, and her words.
Next morning I woke up with the enemy’s pheran under my pillow. It had a mysterious odor. I sent my assistant to the bazaar and washed the pheran along with my clothes, and dried it on the line in my room, hidden between my clothes. While ironing I was very careful not to break the buttons at the back. Two were missing. While ironing I thought, isn’t it funny that in the Hindi language the word for iron and the word for woman is one and the same. I sprinkled water on the garment and ironed till all the wrinkles disappeared.
In the evening I looked at the mountain again. The plane trees were turning color. The mountain carried no memory of the falling elephants. If there was something falling it was a red leaf, falling very slowly, without a shriek. I cycled down the mountain with the neatly folded pheran in my kit. When I see her, I thought, I must tell her to stand by the window again, and look at the slopes in the light of the evening. What makes some leaves linger on trees in autumn? I wanted to ask many questions. I wanted to know what was she like before she got married? What was she like as a girl?
How did other strangers respond to her? What were the foods she disliked? Did she have enough to eat? Who taught her to cook? I wanted to ask her all these questions and know all the answers.
When I got to the hospital I parked my bike and walked into the ward. But she was gone. I did not know what to do. So. I cycled to the Hazratbal Mosque via the Zero Bridge. There were people on the bridge. Two cops were guarding the structure, the green trusses. The river was muddy and overflowing. The mosque was in the low-lying area just six hundred yards from the bridge. Flooding was a possibility. An old woman was feeding pigeons inside the compound of the mosque and I removed my shoes and walked barefoot on marble towards her. She was old, but still beautiful. Women in Kashmir were always beautiful. I had no idea how to buy a Qur’an and as I proceeded towards her I noticed the men looking at me suspiciously as if perhaps in my turban I had come to steal the relic. Their eyes were fierce. Their bodies were wet and dripping; it seemed as if they had just stepped out of the hamaam. The old woman pointed her finger towards the store in the street. You do not buy Qur’ans inside the mosque, she said. Then she resumed feeding the pigeons. Patiently she tore the bread into tiny morsels. There were thousands of them, pigeons, shitting in the same compound where they were being fed.
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah
Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah
Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah
Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah
Hayya-Alas-Salat
Hayya-Alas-Salat
Hayya-Alal-Falah
Hayya-Alal-Falah
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
La-ilaha ill-allah
The boy at the store was not paying attention to azan. He was solving math problems. His Philips radio was playing qawalis, Shahbaz Qalandar, and to this day I am able to recall the problem he was struggling with. Years before I, too, had to deal with the same complicated equation in school.
X3 + Y3 = L3 + M3 = 1729
I coughed. He looked up. His nose was running.
‘Do you sell the Qur’an?’
‘How many?’ he asked as if I was going to buy them by the dozen.
‘Kid,’ I said, ‘first explain to me the proper way to give respect to the Qur’an.’
‘Are you buying?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘One.’
‘Then I will teach you,’ he said.
The boy wrapped the book in a velvet cloth.
‘Wash your hands before praying,’ he said.
‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘We do the same in Sikhism.’
He didn’t seem interested in learning about my religion and returned to math. I almost told him the correct answer, but changed my mind. 1729. The smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
X = 1
Y = 12
L = 9
M = 10
The man who first solved this problem was the South Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He was a genius and he solved this problem on his deathbed at the age of twenty-nine. In school the teacher used to tell us many stories about math. She also told us that zero – the most important ingredient of math – was invented in our own country, only later the concept migrated to Arab countries.